At Ender Labs, pretty much everyone but me uses a Mac. In the last year or so, I've started to realize that there must be some new Mac app or function that, via a hotkey, allows you to select an arbitrary region of your screen, create a screenshot, and then automatically uploads it to a hosting service. I know this, without doing any research, because in irc/slack/gtalk I've started receiving screenshots as responses to questions I ask. These screenshots arrive fairly quickly after said question is asked.

I rarely take screenshots (unless I absolutely have to), because my process involves opening gimp, going to file->create->screenshot, selecting the "select region to grab" option, setting the delay to 2 seconds so I can get the gimp window out of the way, selecting the area I want to screenshot, exporting it to a jpeg, and then uploading it to my server. It's enough hoops to jump through that I usually just try to describe what I'm seeing rather than taking a screenshot.

I liked this instant screenshot idea, and went looking for something like it for Linux. I found a few apps, but nothing were exactly what I wanted, so I decided to write my own. It's just a short, dirty python script that uses ImageMagick'simport command to screenshot a region, then automatically uploads the resulting jpeg to my server, and copies the url to X's primary clipboard with xclip. The python code is below.

Note: If you enter your email address, you will be subscribed to
this article and will recieve comment updates via email. This is the only thing your address will be used for. A link will
be provided at the end of each email that will allow you to unsubscribe should you need to,
or you can go to http://synicworld.com//unsubscribe to unsubscribe from any/all updates.